Common PC problems and how to fix them: SSD – DIY in 5 Ep 205

SSDs (solid state drives) can experience wear over time, but to help you identify when this is happening, they have wear indicators. When they show up, it’s a good time to think about a replacement or at least maintenance. This video covers how to fix SSDs and other common problems they can cause.

This series has covered the virtues of SSDs over HDDs (hard disk drives), such as their blistering speed, their energy efficiency, and their lack of moving parts making them less prone to mechanical failure. However, they are not immune to it. Tires can only cycle so many times before they are physically unable to continue. The same is true of SSDs. An SSD’s limit of program erase cycles to the NAND is called terabytes written (TBW).

Symptoms
SSDs close to failure will show one or more of the following signs:
If you notice crashes during startup, check whether restarting the computer more than once temporarily allows the boot process to finish. If saving files takes an extremely long time, this could be a sign of bad blocks on your drive (the sectors in your drive that have suffered physical damage and can no longer be accessed). Physical wear and tear occurs in the standard read/write cycles of an SSD and will with enough use cause bad blocks.

Specific files may be inaccessible, which is another indicator that the drive is failing.
Especially when performing intense read/writes, some SSDs can run hot. That’s why some SSDs are sold with heatsinks. SSDs are still less prone to overheating than older HDDs. That means unusually high temperatures could be a sign the drive is failing.
Remember that wear is not the only thing that could cause these symptoms: physical damage is a factor that can never be ruled out. The SMART Monitoring tool is one way of monitoring your SSD.

SMART
SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. It’s a system built into most modern HDDs and SSDs, designed to monitor the status of your drive and identify issues to fix. CrystalDiskInfo is a great tool to tap into SMART on your SSD and provide a concise report on the status of your drive.

Certain SSD manufacturers have their own tools to monitor drive health. The Kingston SSD Manager (KSM) application provides users with the ability to monitor and manage various aspects of their Kingston solid-state drive.

Summary
While keeping up with SSD maintenance is possible (see    • Extend Your SSD’s Lifespan – SSD Heal...   for more), SSDs are not repairable items. They must be replaced when they fail or are about to die. However, techniques exist to identify impending issues, so you can back up and replace before things get bad.

Check for crashing during startup, saving files taking too long, inability to access or read specific files, and if your drive overheats. Monitoring applications can automate some of this. Rather than being paranoid about drive failures, have an app that runs in the background to alert you in case of trouble. It’s a solid win.

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0:00 Intro
0:30 SSD vs HDD
1:02 SSD Wear
1:23 Symptoms
2:35 Solutions: Monitoring Tools
2:44 SMART
3:28 Summary

#SSD #TBW #SMARTmonitoring